There might be a few organizations that know exactly how many servers they’ll require to handle their database needs for any given period of time, but for most large enterprises whose success depends upon flows of multiple terabytes of data in often unpredictable surges, this is rarely the case.
Capacity planning is a guessing game, especially when an organization’s lifeblood is real-time, streaming data that enables it to perform real-time analysis to deliver interactions to users. The safest decision is to pay for peak capacity—even during times when far fewer servers are needed.